[codesushi42]

Anyone remember when Geocities was a virtual city with neighborhoods?

I remember having to click around a visualization of a neighborhood block, and having to reserve a homepage. Homepages were limited per neighborhood. Each neighborhood had a name that was part of the URL path to the page.

That was very early in Geocities' life, and the artificial scarcity they tried to create didn't last long. But that's the story behind the name "Geocities".

[filmgirlcw]

I do! I was in the “Pines” neighborhood of Silicon Valley! I signed up for my first site in 1996 when I was 13.

I was a teen “community leader” for GeoCities from 1997 - 1999 (from the ages of 14-16), which basically meant I was unpaid tech support who would answer help emails about using GeoCitied and html and going through blocks in my neighborhood to make sure websites didn’t violate the various community guidelines. In exchange I got more space and a custom domain. The problem is my custom username meant my site was never backed up in the GeoCities archived because when Yahoo moved to usernames, there were issues preserving/indexing sole of the old ones. The Wayback Machine has some of the site but not all of it or the images.

I got some free GeoCities stock that became Yahoo stock that became worth $400 a share that my mom wouldn’t let me sell (I was 15 or 16 and it was an etrade custodial account), something that 20 years later I still bitch at my mom about (it was the only time she ever interjected in the managing of my finances).

After Yahoo bought GeoCities, they sent out this survey for the CLs to fill out, asking about community and some product things and thoughts on how they could integrate with Yahoo. I sent some detailed response and was asked to get on a conference call to talk more in-depth. The call went really well and they offered to fly me out to Sunnyvale to discuss more in person/maybe look at a job or some consulting. I was obviously excited, thinking they knew I was a teen CL — I was thinking it would be a cool internship or summer job. When they found out I was 16, the conversation ended and looking back, I get the impression they were embarrassed to be taking feedback from a teenager (today, company’s actively seek that out).

The teen program was ended shortly after — I suppose someone realized it probably wasn’t legal to have minors policing content. The whole CL program was shut down not long after after someone sued Yahoo for employing unpaid labor.

I will always love GeoCities — it was my Introduction not just to building for the web but to online communities in general.

[ben165]

Thanks for sharing this story. Sure, it is unpaid labour somehow. But it's also a chance to get more into responsibility and technology.

[filmgirlcw]

Absolutely! Even now, I certainly don’t feel exploited or angry about my volunteer effort. It was my first experience with any sort of online community and I’ll treasure it forever.

I do side-eye the decision to take minors as volunteers — as grateful as I was/am for the experience personally — because even circa 1996 that seems like a questionable idea. (Though in truth, I suppose if there had been an age limit and not a teen sunset program overseen by a nice adult volunteer, I suspect many of the teens would’ve just lied about their age. I know I would have!)

I wanted more space for my website and to give back/learn. This program provided that.

Over the two years I was a volunteer tree, I got an Amazon gift certificate, some GeoCities merch, and some stock that was at one point worth $20,000. I will always be grateful.

[henvic]

When I was something around 13 years old, Oracle made a presentation for its SQL database in a hotel in my hometown.

I signed up, and the presentation should be a few days later. One or two days later, Oracle called my home and asked to speak with me. It was what my background was, and I told I enjoyed programming and told them my age, explaining I was still going to school.

They said that unfortunately, the event was for grow-ups and that I couldn't attend it. But no worries, when it did an event for kids, they would call me.

Thankfully they never called me back. Now I'm a happy PostgreSQL user and only queried an Oracle database a few times during my bachelor in Computer Sciences because the teacher of database systems forced us to use it.

[fouc]

I'm confused, did yahoo stock value peak before you turned 18 years old or something?

[filmgirlcw]

Yes. I was 16 or 17 when it was at its peak, thus unable to sell without my mom’s permission. The e-trade account was a custodial account; the shares belonged to me but the account was controlled by my mom. When I did sell years later it was for $45 or something a share.

[rasz]

https://www.theatlas.com/charts/B1RjK9Q_

> January 3, 2000: Yahoo stocks close at an all-time high of $475.00 (pre-split price) a share.

shit hit the fan in 2001

[jhabdas]

> Images are copyright and not for use without explicit permission from the owner

As a former CL what are your thoughts on this text I just copied off the OP-linked page?

[pbhjpbhj]

I'll bet the OP never asked for permission, nor for creating this copy of Geocities.

[dangrossman]

I remember that I learned HTML from http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090 -- I can still remember the URL, in the Athens neighborhood -- but I haven't seen the actual webpage in 23 years. I'd love to find an archived copy.

[echelon]

Anecdotes like this make me so sad at what we've lost.

I spent so much of my early teenage years on Geocities, Angelfire, EzBoards, AIM, ICQ. It's all but vanished.

We should have done a much better job with preservation.

I'm hoping someone will one day bump into un-formatted hard drives from some of these old web hosting companies and resurrect the content.

It's weird to feel so much nostalgia for intangible things.

It's also weird to reminisce about youth. Despite all of the new tech, and the wealth and career I've built, and the people I've met, I sometimes wish I could relive the early 2000s. It feels like all of the adventure and newness has been sucked out of the world. And then I snap out of it.

[Causality1]

I agree with you completely. I miss the days when every website felt like its own solar system, separated by light-years of empty space from all the others. Who you were and what you did on one site had nothing to do with your life on another site unless you went out of your way to make it. When you made a friend somewhere you put them on your instant messenger list and actually talked to them, as opposed to just adding another name to your giant pile of useless Facebook friends. The modern net feels like an endless series of stages with everyone putting on their own show to an uncaring audience instead of real communities. When everything on a website was hosted by the website. I miss when my bookmarks folder had four dozen websites in it that I visited almost every day, instead of five. I used to get news about my interests from ten different sites, now it's just two. I used to get porn from half a dozen places, now it's one. Used to talk to people on five different platforms, now it's maybe two. Used to read over two dozen web comics, now it's just one.

[geocities]

"We should have done a much better job with preservation." - and that is exactly it, people in the future will look back and shake their heads at the callousness with which we just deleted early history

[PavlovsCat]

> "We should have done a much better job with preservation." - and that is exactly it, people in the future will look back and shake their heads at the callousness with which we just deleted early history

I wonder if they'll even look back, at all. Even newspapers post articles linking to tweets or youtube, or articles elsewhere, without mirroring anything. Those will be much more useless than pure text articles that at least describe what they reference. Social media, HN, reddit -- so much is just a stream of things. Permanence and curation, something like building a library, those ideas seem rather abandoned.

[yesenadam]

Facebook seems very good at not deleting data...

[xeeeeeeeeeeenu]

Wayback Machine has it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020130181017/http://www.geociti...

[Figs]

Older version from 1996 (23 years ago): https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...

[filmgirlcw]

This is also where I learned HTML! I printed much of the site out on my middle school’s laser printer and kept it in a file folder along with other resources!

I would code my HTML on paper in class and then type it up during lunch or once I got home from school. What a time!

[derefr]

I've always thought it'd be neat to return to that model for modern centralized blogging services (e.g. Wordpress.com). No need for it to be a literal representation of backend sharding or what-have-you; just more of a skeuomorphism. Taking an approach like:

1. Allow everyone to self-assign a neighbourhood when they sign up (not with Geocities' interest-based neighbourhoods, but rather just a set of arbitrary ones, like MMO server shards);

2. Use some distance metric (maybe after your blog has five posts or so to data-mine) to calculate proximity, assigning people "street addresses" within that neighbourhood;

3. Let people know who their digital "neighbours" are, and encourage people to help out their neighbours, send them welcome messages, etc. Maybe invite people to message their neighbours when the neighbour's blog has been inactive for a while, to find out if they're okay. Other cute slice-of-life-y not-at-all-just-ways-to-increase-stickiness things. ;)

(#2 would be especially interesting, I think, if new blogs could show up "between" existing blogs, such that one of your previously-most-proximate neighbours is suddenly two spaces down and you have a new even-closer closest neighbour. Without this.)

[kalleboo]

I thought I was the only one who remembered that!

And there was some experimental "find an empty spot" tool that was just an unstyled form in a /cgi-bin directory, and once you went to the empty spot it found, it was already taken...

I got frustrated and gave up, but we soon switched ISPs and the new one gave you 5 MB of hosted space under algonet.se/~username

[matt_j]

I had a Geocities site in high school (mid 90s) complete with wood panel background, animated gifs (rotating skull, etc), visitor counter, headings with color gradient, blinking text and an autoplay midi file of Hotel California.

I'm so sorry. :)

[hermitdev]

I dont remember the neighborhoods so much, but I do remember having at least 4 email accounts for geocities to get extra space. For a while, I ran a Civilization 2 mod site on geocities. Been so long ago, dont even remember the account name...

[acjohnson55]

LOL. My half-assed Civ 2 mod was one of my Geocities site's "features".

[burlesona]

That's how I remember it too. I remember hunting around for a while for a good "location" to park my page, and then many hours spent learning HTML. I was about 12 at the time and had a lot of free time on my hands, haha.

[jl6]

I do, and I’d love to hear if there was an archive from this era, as this is where my first website was hosted. I didn’t keep any of the files myself so as far as I know it’s conpletely lost.

[mighty_bander]

I do remember that! I even signed up for a page during that time, which I promptly forgot about forever.

[bdcravens]

Yeah, mine was somewhere in the College Park “neighborhood”

[billpg]

I had GeoCities when it was called GeoPages.

Yeah, I'm old!

[jes5199]

my screen-name here contains my address from those days